Palmer busy replacing aging water main lines

PALMER — Navigating torn-up downtown streets has lately become something of a summertime routine, but city officials say the end is in sight.

The torn-up streets are the result of the city’s efforts to replace aging, leaking water mains. According to the city’s public works director, Carter Cole, there are only three areas left on the city’s water main replacement schedule. Two of those should be finished this summer.

Specifically, that would be a rectangle of streets on the city’s southern edge, including portions of Bonanza and Chugach streets as well as Industrial Way and Commercial Drive.

On the north end of town, Gulkana Street from Arctic to Dolphin avenues will be torn up, as well as a couple of blocks of Dolphin, Caribou and Auklet avenues running west from Gulkana.

Cole said the third project — replacing the mains under part of North Alaska Street and the western reaches of Caribou Avenue and Dolphin Avenue, is slated for design work this summer and will hopefully be completed next year.

If all goes according to plan, Cole said, “we’ll finish the steel water main replacement four years ahead of schedule.”

Anyone who remembers the geyser that erupted out of Colony Way last summer will probably understand why the city had to act with such urgency.

The system had been slated for replacement for years. There were plans to replace some last summer when the geyser changed the city’s focus. Cole said the pipes just couldn’t wait as long as the city planned.

City Manager Bill Allen said that when he signed on with the city in 2007 the leakage rate for the water system was 46 percent. Cole said that since then the city has reduced leakage by 10 percent. He said he’d like to reduce that further. Ten percent is a normal leakage rate for a well-performing system, and he’d like to see Palmer get there.

But every time another pipe bursts, the leakage statistics are skewed. Cole recalled a call he got from Matanuska Electric Association asking how the city had managed to reduce its electrical consumption from its water pumps by 12 percent.

He said he was about to brag about the city’s reduced leakage rate, but then “just that day we lost a couple hundred thousand gallons on Dolphin.”

Still, Cole was proud to say that, in the end, the city will have replaced almost all of its mains without using any of its own money. The bulk of the projects were done with state and federal grants. He credited Allen’s political connections for that. But Allen doesn’t want all the credit.

“This money came in, but it’s because we had our plans together,” he said.

After the mains are all replaced, there are a number of water system projects Cole would like to tackle. There’s an aging reservoir he’d like to replace, and he wouldn’t mind moving the city’s wells to an area of town where the real estate isn’t so prime. The wells require a buffer zone that hinders nearby land development.

And while all this is going on the city is also expanding its system. The current lines end at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center. While the state’s Department of Transportation is installing a new Trunk Road, the city is right there working with the state’s contractor to put water mains in up to Mat-Su College. A large portion of that project should be complete this summer.

“We convinced the Department of Transportation to let us into their rights-of-ways” Allen said, which is something almost unheard of in local government.

Cole said the water mains will follow the road and go no farther. But Allen pointed out that, with so much undeveloped land along Trunk, a smart developer with land in the area would be knocking on the city’s doors trying to see how to get hooked into the system.

He also pointed out that putting infrastructure in place in what the Mat-Su Borough has referred to as its nascent University-Medical District is forward-thinking city planning.

Once the economy recovers, he said, “that’s where the business center of the Valley is going to be.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.